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Excerpted from the upcoming book: “Diego’s life lessons: 99 tips for survival, fun, and profit in today’s baffling bric-a-brac world.” (see Part I and Part II).

#9 make the right career choices

Everyone will have seven careers in their lifetime, someone said once, and we all repeated it even if we have no idea why.

The key to career planning, though, is to keep in mind that while the world of today ranges from complicated to downright baffling, the world of tomorrow will be pretty predictable, since as we all know it will just be a barren hellscape populated by Zombies.

So the question is: post-Zombie Apocalypse, what will you need to be? Survival in the new Zombie-infested world will require the skills of any good D&D party: a Healer, a Warrior, a Thief, and a Wizard — which in a world without magic means someone to tinker with things, build weapons, design shelters with complicated spring traps, and knowledge of how to brew a good cup of coffee.

Clearly you don’t want to be a Healer (read: medic/doctor), since that means no one will be able to fix you — you should have friends or relatives with careers in medicine, however, for obvious reasons. Being a Thief will be of limited use, but more importantly it’s not really the kind of thing you can practice for without turning to a life of crime as defined by our pre-Zombie civilization (post-Zombies, most of the things we consider crimes today will become fairly acceptable somehow, so you may be able to pull this off with the right timing).

That leaves you with either Warrior or Wizard, which translates roughly to: Gun Nut or Hacker. And by “Hacker” we mean the early-1980s definition of hacker, rather than the bastardized 2000s version, and one that is not restricted to computers.

So. Your choices for a new career path are as follows:

If you’re a Nerd, become a Hacker.

If you’re neither a Nerd or a Hacker, just become a Gun Nut, it’s the easiest and fastest way to post-apocalyptic survival. This way, while you wait for Zombies to strike you won’t need to worry (for example) about a lookup being O(N) or not, or why the CPU on some random server is pegged at 99% without any incoming requests.

If you’re already a Gun Nut, you’re good to go. Just keep buying ammo.

If you’re already a Hacker… please don’t turn into an evil genius and destroy the world. Try taking up some activity that will consume your time for no reason, like playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or learning to program for Blackberry.

NOTE (I): If you’re in the medical profession, just stay put. We will protect you so you can fix our sprained ankles and such.
NOTE (II): there is also the rare combination of Hacker/Nerd+Gun Nut, but you should be aware that this is a highly volatile combination of skills which can have unpredictable results on your psyche.

#45: purchase a small island in the Pacific Ocean

As far as having a permanent vacation spot, this one really is a no-brainer. Why bother with hotels when you can own a piece of slowly sinking real estate? Plus, according to highly reliable sources, you don’t need to be a billionaire.

True, you will have significant coconut-maintenance fees and you’ll probably need a small fleet of Roombas to keep the place tidy, but coconuts are delicious and the Roombas can help in following lesson #18.

NOTE I: don’t be fooled by the “Pacific” part of “Pacific Ocean.” There’s nothing “pacific” about it. There’s storms, cyclones, tsunamis, giant garbage monsters, sharks, jellyfish, and any number of other dangers. Therefore, an important followup to purchase the island is to buy an airline for it. You know, to be able to get away quickly, just in case.

NOTE II: this is actually an alternative to the career choices described above, since it is well known that Zombies can’t swim.

NOTE III: the island should not be named Krakatoa — see lesson #1. Aside from this detail, owning a Pacific Island does not directly conflict with lesson #1, since the cupboard can be actually located in a hut somewhere in the island (multiple cupboard hiding spots are also advisable).

#86 Stock up on Kryptonite

Ok, so let me tell you about this guy… He wears a cape and tights. He frequently disrobes in public places. He makes a living writing for a newspaper with an owner that makes Rupert Murdoch look like Edward R. Murrow. He has deep psychological scars since he is the last survivor of a cataclysmic event that destroyed his civilization. He leads a secret double life, generally disappearing whenever something terrible happens. He is an illegal alien. Also, he is an ALIEN.

Does this look like someone trustworthy to you? Hm?

That’s right. This is not a stable person.

Add to the list that he can fly, even in space, stop bullets, has X-ray vision, can (possibly) travel back in time and is essentially indestructible. How is this guy not a threat to all of humanity?

Lex Luthor was deeply misunderstood — he could see all this, but his messaging was way off. Plus there were all those schemes to Take Over The World, which should really be left to experts like genetically engineered mice.

The only solution to this menace is to keep your own personal stash of Kryptonite. Keep most of it in a cupboard (see lesson #1) and a small amount on your person at all times.

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When my home phone… you know, the bulky, heavy one, plugged in to a wireline (perhaps for sentimental reasons, at this point), rings… I don’t answer.

Ever.

It is muted. Permanently.

There’s a generation … a group of people, a dividing line, somewhere… for whom the idea of a dialtone, of verified communication, sounds insane. Most of them are kids at this point, sure, but some aren’t. To me, it is noticeable. To others, it is alien.

A dialtone.

Think about it, how many people alive today don’t know what a dialtone is? Have never heard one?

How many people do not answer their phone because they assume it’s spam?

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via an old post from Mystery Man on Film, The “Raiders” Story Conference:the transcripts of meetings in 1978 during which George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan ironed out what would become Raiders of The Lost Ark. It is really something to see the movie unfold in the discussion, the recurring themes and references (e.g. James Bond), the highly structured way in which Lucas (in particular) approached the story-crafting process, and moments like this, when Lucas first names the character:

Kasdan: Do you have a name for this person?

Lucas: I do for our leader.

Spielberg: I hate this, but go ahead.

Lucas: Indiana Smith. It has to be unique. It’s a character. Very Americana square. He was born in Indiana.

Kasdan: What does she call him, Indy?

Lucas: That’s what I was thinking. Or Jones. Then people can call him Jones.

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“The movie will begin in five moments,” the mindless voice announced. All those unseated will await the next show. We filed slowly and languidly into the hall. The auditorium was vast and silent. As we were seated and were darkened, the voice continued.

“The program for this evening is not new. You’ve seen this entertainment through and through. You’ve seen your birth, your life and death. You might recall all the rest. Did you have a good world when you died?… Enough to base a movie on?”

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You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

Paul Auster, Winter Journal

Solipsistic. That’s the word I’m looking for.

We all experience solipsism at times, and consciously applied it can be a refuge, even if not quite a philosophy. A natural reaction, probably, at the attack on the ego that are shared experiences. After all, if nothing is real, nothing can hurt you. Right? Biographies can bridge the gap, to climb out of the hole, at least briefly. They’re also about ghosts, beyond the more classical definition of the word: the ghosts of who yourself and others were.

I’ve been re-reading three this week. Two autobiographies, neither of which, perhaps appropriately, was written in the first person, and one biography.

The first is Winter Journal by Paul Auster. Maybe not his best work, but still worthwhile. Subdued, fragmentary. Nowhere near the power of The Invention of Solitude. Written in the second person, it feels disembodied at times even as he describes the physical in detail: “a catalog of sensory data,” he says at some point, and after all this is much of what consumes life, living, death, dying. The narrative nudges, rather than pushes, forward. It ends up feeling like a meditative exercise.

Joseph Anton: A Memoir, the second book, is on the other hand like being thrust into the edge of a tornado. You can see the calm center of the storm, integral to it but out of reach, as you spin wildly on its edges. This is may also not Rushdie’s best, but to place it against works of fiction, however autobiographically informed they may be, is a disservice in my mind. “Life and death” feels real in these pages, and I doubt any one of us could have done better at navigating the choices he faced. Fear is palpable, so is anger: he could have easily borrowed the title from his 2001 book: Fury. Writing it in third person as he did may have been the only way to frame these experiences.

Rushdie’s celebrity status is responsible for a lot of the negative reaction towards this book, but it’s an important work, and I tend to ignore what surrounds the celebrity obsession within the book, wives, girlfriends, meeting Bono… and focus instead on the struggle around the fatwa and The Satanic Verses. Self-publishing is revolutionary and is happening in this area is important and in any case would happen no matter what. But disintermediation can have the effect of, um, disintermediating and therefore exposing bare an artist, leaving them without a support structure. What would happen today, I wonder, if instead of principled editors and publishers all that stood between an artist and a murder proclamation was… the complaints department at Amazon?

I wonder.

This applies more broadly. The very force that gives everyone a voice may be also be empowering those who want nothing but to take our voices away (think China, or Iran, or Syria, or…).

Irony.

Which brings me to Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D. T. Max, and perhaps the best book I read last year. Here, finally, a biography written in third person about a third person. It could also have been subtitled “DFW’s Battles With Irony And Addiction,” although it didn’t deal exclusively with that of course, and I use the word “with” carefully here, since it doesn’t univocally mean against. What follows is a brief passage that illustrates well not only some of these ideas but also makes visible to different degrees strands that are woven throughout the book and the story, and DFW’s life.

America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied. The effect of Leyner’s fictional approach to life—mutated, roving, uncommitted—like that of Letterman and Saturday Night Live—was to make our addiction seem clever, deliberate, entered into voluntarily. Wallace knew better. And now he was far clearer on why we were all so hooked. It was not TV as a medium that had rendered us addicts, powerful though it was. It was, far more dangerously, an attitude toward life that TV had learned from fiction, especially from postmodern fiction, and then had reinforced among its viewers, and that attitude was irony. Irony, as Wallace defined it, was not in and of itself bad. Indeed, irony was the traditional stance of the weak against the strong; there was power in implying what was too dangerous to say. Postmodern fiction’s original ironists—writers like Pynchon and sometimes Barth—were telling important truths that could only be told obliquely, he felt. But irony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: “This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. That was it exactly—irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.”

D.T. Max., Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story

Life. Addiction. Irony. Death. There are no simple, clean, tidy answers, and fragmentaryis an appropriately recurring idea.

DFW, commenting on Infinite Jest once said that the novel was “[…] sort of what it’s like to be alive […] really a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the twentieth story of a building.”

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A good friend once told me: “Assume good intentions.” Those three words have been hugely influential in my world view in the last few years. Once you make this idea explicit it can shape how you think about what others do in significant ways.

I was reading today about some of the brouhaha surrounding Lean In and the whole why-is-a-billionaire-woman-telling-women-everywhere-what-to-do thing and there was a reference for the launch of Circles.

Gina & Team: congratulations on the launch, it must have been a crazy effort and it looks great.

It seems it’s been building up for a while (the controversy around the book, that is) but I had not seen it until today when I read this article in The New Yorker.

Why I bring this up is that what keeps coming back to me in all of this is how our perspective in the Valley is sometimes clouded by second-hand opinions, innuendo, and gossip, for example around who got funded by whom or which idea is “in”. Yes, this is not unique to the Valley, but it happens frequently here and so I can attest to it, in my own backyard (so to speak… the actual inhabitants of my shared backyard are bluebirds and squirrels).

Putting yourself out there, through a book, art, or even, yes, software, is a hard thing to do. People misunderstand and misinterpret your intentions and motivations constantly, and the schadenfreude that is sadly all-too-common makes things even harder. But we are all just people, trying to do the best we can. The number of significant zeros in your bank account doesn’t change that in most cases. And I say that having very few significant zeros left in my own bank account.

But, funny thing (not ha-ha funny), most of the people that have such strong opinions on these things have never done them. They “talk about the book” without having “read the book.” (You really need to read The New Yorker article to get this reference). Some of my brothers-in-arms work at Evernote, but do they get press and coverage when they “just” keep an awesome service/app running? No. They get press when someone breaks into their systems.

Controversy sells.

Don’t get me wrong: critics are good> But it’s a matter of degrees. I’m not saying you need to write a book to be able to critique a book, or that you need to start a company to be give your opinion on how ist should be run, but at the very least spend a moment and consider the effort involved. Avoid ad hominems. Forget about money for a second. Consider how much of their lives these people are sacrificing trying to do something.

Assume good intentions.

I bet that if you did that you’d find yourself a bit more forgiving of missteps, a bit more understanding, a bit more willing to believe.

And for those who are doing it, regardless of the scope or (apparent) size of your project, here’s something I could not say out loud because it would sound terrible given my accent… but I can write it: Gina, Sheryl, and all of you out there who are putting yourselves, your sanity, on the linefor an idea: Give ‘em hell.

:-)

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I am fascinated by (obsessed with?) slang, colloquialisms, jargon, argot, and of course language use and misuse in general. Perhaps most entertaining are slang and colloquialisms that pop up and become widespread in the space of a few years.

“Honestly…,” “Let’s unpack this,” and a few notable others have become more frequent (at least from my point of view) and I wanted to dissect them a bit and think about what could be behind them.

New terms or ways of communicating can be hard to see “appear” sometimes, since they enter everyday language incrementally, and the best part is that some of them may not be new at all, “new” defined here as “having popped up in the last 10 years”, but they may be new to me as they become common or even pervasive in the conversations I have and the information landscape that I inhabit.

There’s more than pure nerdish entertainment to this. For one thing, it can be used as a lens through which to look at society and culture, but more specifically at organizations and what makes them tick. Religions, in particular are an interesting subtype of organization since some of them maintain their high-level structures for hundreds or thousands of years. For example, Scientology’s obsession with redefining language is notable in that they are at the extreme end of the spectrum combining both jargon and and repurposing of common language, which naturally affects how you communicate and therefore relate to, and to some degree how we perceive, reality.

Startups go through a similar (even if simultaneously more overt and less structured) process in this regard. Most of us have seen how companies have their own terminology for everything. In engineering, in particular, you could literally sit through an entire conversation about infrastructure between two engineers from the same company and never know what they’re talking about, while in marketing or sales they don’t so much invent terminology as repurpose it freely, leading to a overloading of commonly used terms that can some times create confusion (e.g. “Active users” or even “pageviews”).

I’m not saying that startups, tech companies, or even non-tech companies are cults (Apple’s perception as such notwithstanding..), but there’s some similarities that I think speak to a need of a group, no matter of what kind, to define itself as separate from everyone else and, of the mechanisms necessary for that to happen, language is one of the easier starting points.

But back to what are more widely shared colloquialisms and/or slang, here’s a few personal favorites that I’ve observed have become more common in recent years, and some of my own musings on what’s behind them.

Some of these trigger “old man yells at cloud” syndrome in me, since (apparently) I have a hard time handling the cognitive dissonance, sheer nonsense, or just plain lack of meaning involved.

“Like, you know…” and the invisible question mark that follows

This one is fairly established, dating I think back to the mid-90s. And it hasn’t just endured, it has become so widespread and entrenched that it’s definitely worth mentioning.

It’s one of the most fascinating colloquialisms in my opinion. It’s a simile in which the structure that follows “like” is not explicit, but rather vaguely points to some idea that perhaps, maybe, hopefully, the other person shares in some indeterminate way in the statement we’re about to make, while expressing that we really don’t care too much one way or the other.

It is maddening to me to be in a conversation in which the other person constantly trails off, attaching “like, you know”s and question marks at the end of sentences. We are, apparently, not supposed to have conviction anymore, and language tinted with this construct communicates that clearly. It says: I have nothing invested in this statement.

All too often, in fact, “Like, you know…?” has no follow up at all and it just trails off, the question mark implicit in the inflection of our voice, the interrogative tone, the you know parenthetical. It’s filler, pretending that you’re saying something when you really aren’t, a statement without content, a commitment to nothing in particular that nevertheless creates the impression that we’re communicating. Whatever is said gets turned into a question, something to be challenged on the receiving end. But when the receiver also answers with similar lack of definition, then it’s just a bunch of words strung together, isn’t it? A charade: because, actually, we don’t want to have a real conversation.

Declarative language, straight up statement of beliefs, of facts, of what we know to be true even if it is subjective, has been appropriated by the extremes, the Glenn Becks of the world. The alternative, nuance and complexity of thought, are in everyone else often replaced by a quivering indecision.

The flip side of this indecision is how we pretend to counteract it with an earnest declaration: “Honestly…”

“Honestly”

This type of preface or clarification instantly triggers, at least for me, the thought that the rest of what the other person’s been saying has not been “honest.” Not “dishonest” necessarily, but the addition raises the level of whatever comes after over what came before. And, when it’s used constantly it just makes me question everything.

Aside from combining it with “like, you know…”, to give the appearance of weight while simultaneously reducing the importance of what we’re saying, “honestly” is also used in many other cases. Why are we suddenly using this modifier so frequently? Is it that in a world when The Onion‘s headlines can appear as serious as those in The New York Times we have suddenly decided that, by default, everything is suspect? Or is it perhaps that PR, marketing and advertising are so pervasive that we look at everything with skepticism and some degree of mistrust, requiring the additional emphasis of “honestly” to separate what we say from what we’re supposed to say? Maybe a bit of both. Ironically, advertising continues to be pretty effective. Instead of applying these filters to ads, we look at everything with suspicion.

“Let’s unpack this”

This one seems to have become more common in the last couple of years. I don’t know if it’s been traced back to its origins, but it seems to me that it’s a byproduct of technology –both explicitly and implicitly, partially around lack of trust, but also increased (real and perceived) complexity.

Explicitly: software, first, where so many things are “packaged” and have to be “unpacked” to look at them. More importantly, thanks to e-commerce, followed by a relatively new phenomenon of boxes everywhere. We all get packages at home or the office that have to be unpacked. Think back, pre-e-commerce, how common was it to get a package? For most people, not very. Now, unpacking is a frequent action in our daily lives, a common occurrence.

Implicitly: everything around us now has layers within layers, a Matryoshka doll of seemingly neverending complexity. The phrase “let’s take a look under the hood” used to be applicable beyond cars — the world generally had one level. You’d open the hood and there was the engine. Done. Now, “under the hood” is just the first of many layers, even in cars (batteries, microprocessors, software…). A phone is no longer just a phone, and you can even have a phone built into your car, nevermind connected to it. A car contains maps. The maps contain reviews. The reviews link to social media. And on and on it goes. The ongoing merging of cyberspace and meatspace often leads us down rabbit holes in everything we touch.

Which also relates to “Honestly” since “Unpacking” is often used for discussing statements by public officials, and even facts. The only way you would need to “unpack” a statement is if its true meaning, or different interpretations, were “packed” under the “wrapping” of its surface. Orwell’s doublespeak (or maybe n-speak?) ingrained to the degree that the default assumption becomes that there’s hidden meaning, or inherent obfuscation. Hence, “Honestly” may be functioning as a vaccine for “Unpacking” — something that communicates “Unpacking not required.”

“Very unique”

Once more, I chalk this one up as trying to counteract the lack of trust we have come to assume in what’s communicated. It is more commonly used by marketing types, but recently I’ve heard with alarming frequency in other contexts.

Something is either unique, or it isn’t. It can’t be “very unique,” or “incredibly unique.” Period. But I suppose that when words like “unique” have become overused, we start to add adjectives in the hopes of making it clear that, yes, this is unique, as opposed to all those other things that we say are unique even if they’re not.

This is the most egregious misuse of an adjective, but there are others. I typically use words like “beautiful,” “love,” “hate,” and others sparsely, because their weight is diminished by attaching them to everything. I like rain, in itself but also because I appreciate sunny days more when they’re juxtaposed with the alternative, and viceversa.

If everything is beautiful, if beautiful is the norm, then how do we talk about something that is special, that touches us beyond that? We start adding superlatives: “incredibly beautiful,” “profoundly beautiful” and so forth (“profound” is another overused term these days, now that I think about it). Until that becomes the way we refer to even the menu transition of an iPhone app, or some icon, or the color of a couch, at which point we are left with a situation in which our depiction of it leaves us little room to enjoy the occasional good thing, because we have done away with contrasts by turning everything into positive happy feelings.

Most of the time, nothing remarkable happens, our lives are routine, and that should be just fine. Also, a lot of things just suck. And that’s a good thing, because if they didn’t we wouldn’t be able to tell when they don’t.